A single spyware program can be used to place a Trojan Horse virus on your computer or it could be used to steal you personal information. This is an evolution of what such a program was intended to do, which was to track your movement. This allowed web developers to target potential advertisers based on where their visitors went online.

Spyware: is a type of malicious software (also called ‘malware’) that scammers try to install on your computer. As the name suggests, spyware programs allow people to spy on what you are doing on your computer: the websites you visit, the files you use and the details you store on your PC. Key-loggers are a particular type of spyware.

Key-loggers secretly record what keys you press on your keyboard and sends this data back to the scammer over the internet.

Adware: This is software that delivers unsolicited advertising to your PC. Sometimes that advertising is "targeted" based on the information provided by spyware.

Hijackers and malware: These are applications that force your PC to do something undesirable. The most benevolent of such programs might change your homepage or install a "Browser helper object" (BHO) that annoyingly adds a bar to the Internet Explorer interface with links to a vendor's Web site. The worst such applications might use your PC to visit Web sites to generate hits on pay-per-click ads, dial 1800 numbers using your modem or even offer up your PC's processing power for use in distributed applications.

Spyware Removal

Of course the most important feature of an anti-spyware package is its ability to find and remove spyware. How well it does this is heavily dependent on the quality of its detection database and on the scope of detection. The good news is that all of the popular anti-spyware packages have developed quite comprehensive spyware databases, but there is yet no official benchmark for detection rates of anti-spyware packages.

Detection methods are a key quality indicator. An anti-spyware package that supports drive scans, memory scans and registry scans will catch most spyware.

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